Data Center Power Problems

Power Problems Cause Disturbances and Downtime

Data centers require a high level of electrical reliability, and uninterrupted availability continues to be a significant concern for data center managers. Power quality issues can cause equipment failure, downtime, data corruption, and are expensive for your operations.

What Causes Power Problems?

Although power anomalies can originate outside your facility, equipment and processes within the data center create most power problems. Power anomalies can be a nuisance, or can lead to a complete power failure.

Power supply interference can come in multiple forms:

Voltage transients and surges

Voltage swells, sags, and spikes

Voltage imbalance or fluctuations

Power frequency variation

Poor facility grounding

Causes of power quality issues include load changes, breaker faults, short circuits, or ground faults. Any of these issues can lead to hardware damage or loss of critical processing equipment.

What You Can Do?

Understanding your data center’s environment and equipment capacities can help you identify problems. When exploring power quality issues consider this:

Appropriate Equipment As a facility grows, demands on the power system increase. Assess the capacity of your data center infrastructure. Can it be scaled for future growth? Having the appropriate equipment in place, such as modular/scalable UPS systems can help with future growth, and minimize risk of power failure.For example, UPS systems provide conditioned backup power to keep vital operational systems running while reducing the risk for harmonic disruptions and line transients. Also investing in power monitoring software can help manage power quality issues and predict future problems.

Environment One of the most overlooked factors that could be affecting your data center power is the environment. Regular maintenance of support equipment, generators, UPS & AC systems will increase uptime in the data center.

Addressing power quality issues can be a critical challenge for data center and facility managers whose operations are dense and complex.

As your Vertiv partner, we can help you implement solutions to minimize the risk of future power issues while maximizing operational efficiency and equipment lifespan.

We provide a full line of data center power solutions including power distribution, control, and monitoring. We also offer a data center assessment to help you assess power issues and implement best practices in data center power performance. Contact us today to learn more.

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615.507.1530

About WKA

For 40 years, Walick-Kemp & Associates, Inc. has been the premier supplier of power protection and environmental control systems for mission–critical equipment and facilities in the Middle Tennessee market.